Juan and I became a family on October 10, 2009 at Mary Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Sammamish, WA. He works for Nordstrom Corporate in IT (yay, discount!), and I'm a Certified Medical Assistant for EvergreenHealth. We love watching movies, cooking and baking, entertaining friends and family, and spending time with loved ones.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Guess who turned 35!

...Not me. Thank goodness. LOL But Juan turned 35 on Sunday, so we spent the entire weekend celebrating! We started off on Friday evening with his family, heading to Purple in Bellevue for drinks and appetizers (a usual), and then moved over to Barrio, which is right next door to Purple and owned by the same people. It has a more Mexican flair, and the food is amazing! It's a little on the spicy side, which is a bit of a hazard for me, but since Juan and his family are full-blooded Mexican, they absolutely loved it! I was able to navigate the menu and find something I liked, too, so I didn't feel left out. I got the mushroom tacos (minus the salsa verde), which were really good! I never would have thought to put sautéed mushrooms as taco filling, but they worked out well. Their drunken beans are great, too. I think they're made with beer, and they tasted so good!

Saturday was also fun, because we went and hung out on Capitol Hill in Seattle. We had coffee/pastries (I had a fabulous spinach and feta croissant) at Victrola Coffee, and then had lunch at Six Arms, which is a great pub-type restaurant and bar that serves McMenamin's Brewery stuff. Juan's favorite beer is the Ruby Ale, and the family must have gone through 5 pitchers of the stuff. We also had their famous tater tots, mini corn dogs, and Juan and I shared an order of their fish and chips. As you can tell, we were under the whole It's-Juan's-Birthday-So-Calories-Don't-Count umbrella all weekend. :) For dinner, we went to a place called Tango, and the food there was also tremendously delicious! I had pork with a side of mashed yams with roasted corn. Wow, talk about great! It was a little on the spicy side, but the flavor profile was so good, it wasn't really about the heat, but about how it tasted.

Which brings us to Sunday, when it was just Juan and I left to spend the day together. We drove to Bellevue, and went to Belle Pastry in Bellevue to have coffee and (you guessed it) pastries! I had their amazing ham and cheese croissant, and Juan had a slice of their bread pudding cake. :) It was his birthday, how could I tell him no? Then, we took a nice long walk, and went to Blue C Sushi for a quick, very yummy lunch before going to see Alice in Wonderland in IMAX 3D. :) I highly recommend it! It'd be great for older kids (probably 12 or older, there's some pretty violent/scary scenes), and it was just very entertaining. And of course, it was a classic Tim Burton-ized fairy tale with Johnny Depp at the helm. The new Alice was great, although I'd have loved to see her with some blush on. The story was great, and I loved Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway!! They were spectacularly well-done with their makeup and characters. Very enjoyable! Then we headed to Crate and Barrel for some retail therapy, then we went to El Gaucho's for their Sunday Happy Hour. All of the bar bites were half off, and the drinks were about half as well. We had a $75 gift card that Juan and received when he got my engagement ring a year and a half ago, so we decided this was a perfect opportunity to use it! We shared the mushroom/marsala flatbread, the mac and cheese (OMG SO GOOD), and a burger. We also splurged and got a couple glasses of champagne. We ended up only paying about $11 for dinner, minus the gift card of course.

Come Monday, both of us were so glad that we'd taken the day off! We were so tired from all the running around and celebrating! Unfortunately, Juan's driver's license had expired on his birthday, so we had to drive to downtown Seattle to go get it renewed! But we were able to go get coffee at a great place downtown afterwards, and then we went to have breakfast at a place called Brief Encounter Café in Bellevue. After that, we went to Fred Meyer for some essentials, and then to Whole Foods as our last stop of the morning to get food for the rest of the day.

It really was a great weekend, and I'm so happy that I was able to spend it all with my amazing husband. He really is the light of my life, and I'm so happy to have married him. I hope he had a great birthday, because he deserved it! :)